As people, we are regularly on the edge of an existential panic. Becker said that if you were to see the world realistically; just how vulnerable and totally insignificant you are, in terms of the cosmos, you’d go crazy. So you constantly need stories that build up your self esteem and make you feel significant, which is, of course, what culture provides.

But the thing to remember is that stories are part of a continuum, and they do go on, and that’s why we need so many of us to see them and constantly be telling them, and not worry about where they’re going, but to recognize that the beauty is in telling the story of the moment, and that story will do what it does, if we tell it well and we honor it. And the best thing we can do to honor it is to not worry about where it’s going or what awards it’s going to win or where it’s going to lead, what the clicks are — just what the story is. Don’t let the stories get away. Let the stories touch you.

“There is magic in a mongrelized society. To live among those who are unlike us gives us permission to admit that we ourselves may be unlike what is expected; we may be gay or atheist or unmarried; we may be poets or worshipers with unorthodox approaches to the divine. To be surrounded by only those who appear to be as we appear to be is to feel a silent pressure to appear to be like them.”

“That’s the thing that broke my tough reporter’s heart that digital-dawn day with the tape at 30 Rock – not the horror of sexual assault but my awareness of what I was doing with it: clocking it, timing it, reducing it to bullet points for processing – the way fast-food corporations processed the calves I once bottle-fed in my family’s farmhouse living room on winter mornings too cold for newborns to survive”

“I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me.”

Particularly in nonfiction, the external, the object-world, throws up all these resistances that, if you’re listening, will lure you out of your subjectivity, ask you to leave that neat little system of folklore you cobble together and call the self, and maybe take you somewhere you hadn’t considered.

Stories can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness. Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives—a form of existential problem-solving.

“Somebody would say “let me give you a story”. They never said let me tell you a story. “Let me give you a story”. And I took that to mean that a story was something that was given to you to help you.”

“Unless we become aware of the transitions that are occurring all the time within us, unless we learn to let experience play upon our inner lives as on a finely tuned instrument, we will try to manufacture inner intensity from the outside. We will bang our very bones to roust our own souls.”

I think writers must stay in touch with the fundamentals of life around them in order to render problems powerfully on the page, to offer up what others may be missing, and might need to see. Writers must get our hands dirty before we go on shouting.

Instead, the eternal task for those who create is nothing more than this: to deal in human experience and try to be truthful about it through language. That’s what we do, and all we can do, and when we do it well, it’s huge. Nothing could be more important in terms of art and expression.

There are a small cadre of writers I deeply respect, for their years tending to the work and settling comfortably into their well-weathered voice. It’s a real achievement in this world to labor, over a lifetime – refusing the fast way (if there really is such a thing), paying honor to the craft, staying quiet when silence is required, keeping clear of the dog-n-pony show as much as possible (and it’s never entirely possible), being a good human, helping others be good humans. It’s also a thing of beauty to encounter a writer who is a storyteller in the old sense. “Story” is all the rage these days, but I’m not sure if many of us know what we’re talking about. True storytellers do not let their too-many words get in the way. True storytellers believe the human experience powerful enough and painful enough and joyful enough to stand on its own, so their pen simply opens up the possibilities for us to hear it and see it fresh. I think most of us are too self-conscious for this kind of simplicity. Maybe we just need more years. Maybe we need more hunger. Robert is a true storyteller.

We are all on that train, the one that left print behind, the one where we are constantly in real time, where we know a little about everything and nothing about anything, really. And there is no quiet car.

We are a country of adoption, a country of rescues, a country of mutts. At least that’s how we like to think of ourselves. But we are also a country that likes to create idylls of its own good intentions and then penalize what doesn’t fit.

~The State of the American Dog, Tom Junod

It was sweltering the day I unmarried Marta, and we weren’t even together.

I taught at Yale for five years when I was managing editor and what I tried to stress for students interested in journalism, rather than picking a specialty, like blogging or being a videographer, was to master the basics of really good storytelling, have curiosity and a sense of how a topic is different than a story, and actually go out and witness and report. If you hone those skills, you will be in demand, as those talents are prized. There is too much journalism right now that is just based on people scraping the Internet and riffing off something else.

Lou Marie, my grandmother, is telling this story. It is a story about before, before she was old, before she became the drawl, the accent, the presence behind the white door in her own daughter’s house, with only her hair to keep her from looking like a heap of almost defeated life…

“…such a lonely evening sound… like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so. It is nature’s fault that makes us first full then empty.”

~Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“But it’s evenings like that one that make me want to tell “Write every day” to fuck off, because that evening, I was completely open, and let the world have its way with me a bit—the coal train and the almost-rain and my dear friends and all the heartbreak and strength and purity embroidered onto hearing Neko sing—the way she sings up and out, often with her eyes closed. Like she’s calling out into the landscape, and who knows what might answer back. That was a draft of something, and it didn’t have a word count or a time limit. I created it by living in it, through it.”

Poetry is basic to human beings, our love for it is deeply embedded in us, but there’s the sense at this moment that most people get it from other genres—popular song, hip-hop, rap. People argue about this—someone once told Paul Simon that he wrote poetic lyrics, and he said, “No, poetry is Wallace Stevens”—and yet songwriters like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and some hip-hop artists doclearly channel elements of poetry. In fiction, though, the poetic impulse is usually relegated to the end of the story, in the epiphanic moment we’ve come to expect since Joyce. At the end of a typical epiphany story, you do sense this sudden gearshift from the narrative to the lyrical; you start to feel that poetry is suddenly at work within the prose.

Just because you learn something once at 16, doesn’t mean you won’t have to re-learn it over and over again throughout your life. The big, important things are often crowded out of our heads by small daily concerns.

“We should enjoy our crushes. A crush teaches us about qualities we admire and need to have more of in our lives. The person on the train really does have an extremely beguiling air of self-deprecation in their eyes. The person glimpsed by the fresh fruit counter really does promise to be a gentle and excellent parent. But these characters will, just as importantly, also be sure to ruin our lives in key ways, as all those we love will.”

“Peace — especially at the delicate age of 16 — can have an ego. It can turn off its calculating mind and fall into the dark pit of being satisfied with itself. Forging a continuing peace process means understanding that there are always going to be several viable truths.”

When Lincoln wanted to voice his displeasure, he had to find a secretary or, at the very least, a pen. That process alone was a way of exercising self-control — twice over. It allowed him not only to express his thoughts in private (so as not to express them by mistake in public), but also to determine which was which: the anger that should be voiced versus the anger that should be kept quiet.

When you stand in a church waiting for God and the songs of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed make more sense to you than the promises of divine grace and all-​conquering love, even though you would not say that the darkness of those songs tell the whole story of life on Earth—​then shouldn’t you stand outside of its doors permanently?

“A snob is someone who is so complete in himself and so satisfied with what he has that he needs nothing from anybody. That when a stranger comes up, he can accept that stranger on the stranger’s terms, provided only the stranger observe a few amenities of civilization. That’s what Virginians do. They never push at me. They want nothing of me. They will offer me their hospitality and they will accept me. All I have to do is just behave reasonably.”

I had wanted to capture her while she was still there to be captured, while there was still a trail to follow. It was the proof of how much I needed her, and how much I wanted her to need me. It’s a shock that I guess many parents feel, when the wise patient counselor they have been longing for all their lives turns out to be a kid in diapers.